NewsShift: watchdog journalism with a long tail [Grant application]

Kevin Connor & Matthew Skomarovsky from LittleSis.org (an involuntary facebook of powerful Americans, collaboratively edited by people like you) & David Nolen and myself of ShiftSpace have teamed up and together with Eyebeam have submitted an application for the Knight News Challenge. It is a cross between what LittleSis and ShiftSpace do best, applied to a rethinking of social media meets local journalism. We’re trying to get the best of both centralization (of collaboration and databases) and decentralization (of data sources, contribution and consumption) – combine what makes both the centralized Wikipedia and the distributed blogosphere. From the application:

NewsShift is a web platform that adds a social research layer to online news stories. This layer, accessible from the news page itself, offers readers powerful tools to communicate and develop the story with additional information and insight — facilitating collaborative watchdog journalism.